CONGRESS SHOULD FIX SENTENCING FIASCO

Return Federal Courts to Original Purpose.

While the U.S. Supreme Court wrestles, again, with the issue of
criminal sentencing in federal courts, Congress should revisit the
disaster it created in the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984.

The law was meant to address perceived sentencing disparities among
federal courts. Instead, it flooded federal prisons with inmates
serving very long sentences with no hope of early release - most of
them caught up in the "War on Drugs."

Congress established the U.S. Sentencing Commission to create
sentencing "guidelines" that dictate precise sentences in every case
(down to months) based on a complex matrix of factors. Early release
on parole was abolished, and reductions for good behavior were nearly
eliminated, meaning the sentence handed down is the sentence served.
At the same time, Congress has gone on a bender passing
mandatory-minimum sentences for a growing list of crimes that further
restrict judges' discretion.

The result: The federal prison population rocketed from just over
24,000 inmates in 1980 to nearly 200,000 as of last week. Critics of
the federal-sentencing system, including groups that filed nearly a
dozen legal briefs with the Supreme Court in the two sentencing cases
to be argued tomorrow, contend the system is geared almost entirely to
putting convicts in prison rather than rehabilitating offenders.

This is largely driven by the war on illegal drugs. According to the
Sentencing Project, drug prosecutions in the federal courts have
increased by 144 percent since 1986, and in that time sentences for
drug offenders have tripled in length. The numbers support critics'
contention that the system unfairly impacts minorities: Forty percent
of federal inmates are black, more than three times the percentage of
African-Americans in the general population.

The system gives advantage to federal prosecutors, who can use the
threat of Draconian prison sentences to pry confessions out of
defendants. And it relies less on juries to decide facts than on
bureaucratic pre-sentence investigators who gather information that is
plugged into the guidelines formula.

The stated intent of the sentencing guidelines - to bring uniformity
to sentences - is laudable, but studies suggest they have resulted in
more disparity, not less.

In any case, it is probably impossible to bring uniformity to
sentencing in a nation as big and as diverse as this one.

Which is an argument against the practice by Congress of transferring
criminal cases from state courts, where they belong, to the federal
courts. The states - legislatures and courts - are in the best
position to decide what crimes to confront and how to confront them in
their jurisdictions.

Whatever the Supreme Court does with federal-sentencing laws this
term, Congress should go back to work, eliminate the garden-variety
drug prosecutions and return the federal courts to their original
purpose of hearing major criminal cases that cut across state lines
and exceed local authority and resources. And, in those cases,
Congress should fashion a sentencing scheme that is designed not to
lock people up but to help them become productive and law-abiding citizens.